as explained here, after two and a bit years headwayyouth is being laid to rest in a couple of weeks time and, having spent a few days getting the new blog up and running, the transition can now take place.

i'm keeping well entertained on the tyne at the mo... wedding activity... trips to london... fair trade fortnight... community gatherings... and tonight faithless...zo and i went to see faithless last year and it was incredible. hoping for a repeat performance tonight.

in other news... this blog is shortly to be laid to rest.the organisation which, to date, supports this blog (headway) is no longer called headway and I no longer do any of its youthwork, so headwayyouth couldn't be less descriptive.think i'm going to keep blogging though....just need to find a decent title...

You may have seen a while back that Levi are now selling organic jeans. For those of us who are optimists this was another victory. Hurrah, another company going ethical...

Hold on a minute though. Becky, a fellow ethical enthusiast at TC, has just stumbled across this:

"We regret to announce that Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co.) has resigned
from ETI [Ethical Trading Initiative] following their suspension
for refusing to adopt the ‘Living Wage ’ provision of the ETI Base Code."

London this week was much fun. Busy, but fun! I can imagine hating London if I lived there but while I'm just a visitor I love it. For obvious reasons I'm a public transport fan and once you've mastered the tube it is so unbelievably efficient and also quite fun. But the best thing about London is definitely Soho: all those quirky little shops, Black Market Records (pictured) and ridiculously cheap food (also pictured). If heaven is like anything Soho (minus the sex shops and prostitutes) I'll be a happy man!

So apparently not everyone has photoshop... feeling your pain...If you are one of those unfortunate peeps, then you might be interested in Picnik. It's just a beta at the mo, so some of the functionality is missing, but basically it allows you to edit and amend your photos online using the glorious technology of Web 2.0. Even if you have got photoshop, Picnik has some big advantages primarily it allows you to edit photos that have already been uploaded to Flickr (without downloading and re-uploading), saving a lot of time and hassle.

Yes, I know this is 'my thing', but I figure me commenting about fairtrade during fairtrade fortnight is kinda like a Christian writing something reflective at Christmas or a Jew writing something religious during Hanukah, so get over it!So my exciting trip to london included attending the glitzy launch of Fairtrade Fortnight. The event was full of licensees (ie Green and Blacks, Tesco, Ben & Jerry's) and so I felt a bit out of my depth as more of a campaigner, but the speeches were really interesting. Gail Porter, left, was beautifully simple in her description of how fair trade makes a difference, but the evening was largely dominated by Sainsbury's.As a bit of a fair trade puritan snob this made me more than a little angry. 'We [Traidcraft] bust our ass to make fair trade what it is then Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencer's waltz in a steal the limelight... grumble, grumble!'

I reflected on this a little on the way home and once I got off my high-horse I realised what a good thing this mainstreaming is. Sainsbury's are in the process of switching all their bananas to Fairtrade, their currently at 85% and will reach 100% by May. Sainsbury's sell 1,000 bananas a minute. That is a lot of farmers getting a much better deal than before a few consumers started to kick ass requesting fair trade.There was a feature about all this in Monday's Guardian,

"Yesterday, Caribbean prime ministers who lobbied British government
officials for better trade terms, lined up instead to thank
Sainsbury's. Sir John Compton, the 82-year-old premier of St Lucia,
told Justin King, the head of Sainsbury's: "You have saved the banana
farmers of St Lucia."

Roosevelt Skerrit, 35, the youngest prime
minister in the world when Dominica voted him in last year, said: "The
commitment of the relationship [with Sainsbury's] is unparalleled."

He
added: "As a result of fair trade, our farmers are now able to invest
in their community in the form of school equipment, farm roads and
community facilities."

So inconclusion. Hurrah! The mainstreaming of Fairtrade seems a chuffing good way to MakePovertyHistory.

Just about to leave Traidcraft HQ to board the familiar train to london, for the launch of Fairtrade Fortnight tonight.Generally speaking Fair Trade isn't the trendiest thing around: it normally features a lot of coffee mornings and [middle-aged] fashion shows, so I'm quite looking forward to tonights knees-up.Just got a new phone with a decent camera, so I'll hopefully have some photos for blogging later this week.

Last night a few of us gathered in the north-east to eat and reflect on all things Lenten. Having spoken with lots of people, it became apparent that to develop a sense of community amongst those of us who aren't in churches, eating is pretty important. Amazing how a bottle of vino and some 'pucka tucka' can prove to be a real leveller.

We were keen to meet in the context that we were all on a spiritual journey, so I pulled together a few liturgical bits and bobs from the internet (including this from down under, this from Jonny and this from Bruce Stanley).